How the Internet Helped Me Embrace My Queer Identity

The lone window in my teenage bedroom framed a view of a hilly Appalachian backyard, complete with a weedy vegetable garden, a cluster of truck tires repurposed as flower planters, and a big gray satellite dish. This rusty dish was only one piece of my family’s skyward-pointed collection, with two more mounted to the side of the house — connecting the living-room TV to Dish Network and the 24/7 evangelism of the Seventh-day Adventist church’s broadcast channels. I loved the rare silence when a storm would blow over the mountains and interrupt those signals. The only connection I stressed about losing was the HughesNet satellite internet.

I understand that it may sound trivial — absurd, even — but our family’s upgrade from shrieking dial-up to satellite internet was the single most important event in my young queer life. A jump from kilobits to megabits per second opened up new realms: virtual worlds of cosplay, where gender and sexuality felt like garments I could try on for size.

Back in the prehistoric days of dial-up, when the only gay-ish space I had physical access to was the underwear aisle in Walmart, I had discovered online message boards and made friends I’d chat with every day. I could use the adjective “virtual” here to describe them, but that would imply I actually had real-life friends.

Like so many deeply closeted kids stuck in middle-of-nowhere America, I felt desperately alone, stranded on three sloping acres of my family’s old farm in the mountainous panhandle of Maryland. My well-intended mom, a former principal of Adventist schools, had homeschooled me since kindergarten in hopes of sparing her children from the corrosive influence of the public education system. Adventists have this cult-like belief that they’re among the only ones Jesus Christ will whisk up to heaven, so many of the most devoted followers stay far from secular cities. They retreat to the countryside and earnestly stock basement shelves with canned foods to survive the sinful turbulence of imminent “End Times,” for which queer people are, of course, partially to blame. I distinctly remember our pastor saying as much, as he projected a stock photo of a gay couple in tuxedos and linked hands by a wedding cake. The congregation audibly gasped at the image. I sat red-faced in a rear pew, holding my breath, panicking.

My search history at the age of 12 — around the time I found the more infamous pages in the illustrated Encyclopædia Britannica — included questions like: “Why does God hate gays?” “How to stop being gay?” and “Are there ways to kill yourself that don’t hurt?”

A raunchy and irreverent corner of the web would be my saving grace, my sanctuary, my safe house. I’d spend hours hogging the phone lines in the evening on forums for LGBTQ+ and curious teens, super fans of screamo bands, and the pre-Tumblr porn boards where distant strangers would post low-res nudes of themselves. At 17, my digital queer haven got only more vivid thanks to my unknowing parents upgrading to HughesNet, the only way to get high-speed Internet in the backwoods where broadband cables didn’t reach.

Where before I’d wait for at least a minute as a single photo loaded, satellite Internet meant watching a video clip would not take the remainder of puberty. The only catch was that I must log on after 2 a.m., HughesNet’s designated off-peak hours, during which my data usage wouldn’t count against my family’s monthly allowance. So I’d wait until after my parents and two younger brothers fell asleep before signing on for the still-spotty service — the pixelated glory of video chat giving my first true crush a grainy face and a fuzzy voice.

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I met the boy I’d soon know as Mitch while cruising a gay website, one that I would label NSFYCPTS — that is, Not Safe For Your Conservative Parents To See. It was the kind of sleazy forum where the vast majority of usernames were cringey references to male genitalia and threads were endless lists of porn links. In other words, the quintessential website a gay teen with needs might visit in the middle of the night. An anime-style avatar of a cartoon guitarist had caught my eye. I peeped the profile and skimmed over a bio that sounded like I could’ve written it — a curious East Coast teen plays guitar and drums, and listens to angry-sad music. A green icon lit up, indicating he was also online. I slid into his DMs.

Before long, we had switched over to video chat. At first, I only got a glimpse of his chin. He had his camera positioned so that I’d only see his anonymous-looking jawline, patchy with stubble and dotted with a few stray freckles. “Got a face?” I typed in the chat box. He moved his camera up to show me. His hair was dark and curly, creeping out of a backwards baseball cap into his eyes. He looked like this sporty clerk at the Hot Topic an hour from my house, who I had an unspoken crush on. I titled back the screen of my laptop so the camera would also reveal my face — my shaggy hair was partially covered with a hooded sweatshirt. Wannabe-skater chic.

“Cute,” he typed. Then he flipped on his mic. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

My pulse raced. I turned on my mic, and in a hushed tone, I shyly introduced myself. It took only a few minutes till we each tilted our cameras down farther, fueled by the awkward rush of revealing your body to someone who isn’t actually there, someone whose gaze you command for only a moment — a flash of intimacy that feels palpable even without touching an inch of skin.

This wasn’t my first late-night video chat, but it was the first one that felt real. It was the first time I didn’t log off right as the refractory period set in. My laptop propped on a pillow beside me, we talked for more than an hour about where we were from, the bands we wanted to see live if we could only afford tickets to Vans Warped Tour, the West Coast cities we wanted to run away to. Once yawns began puncturing our phrases, we signed off, but promised to talk again the next night. And then the night after that. And for weeks, I’d chat with him almost every day.

We may have never met in real life. My hand never brushed his on a Friday-night date spent wandering around the mall. I never caressed his faint chest hair or nuzzled his neck. But some part of him and the time we spent staring at each other online felt like it belonged only to me, which is why I was so heartbroken when he so abruptly disappeared.

After standing me up for a chat session, Mitch ghosted. He stopped logging onto the forum where I met him. He stopped answering my Skype messages. He never responded to my email asking where he went and if he was afraid to talk to me anymore. For weeks after, I’d wait up till 3 in the morning, hoping a chat bubble might pop, but I’d never hear from him again.

With as quickly as he vanished from my life, this virtual fling may appear inconsequential; and in the constellation of billions of nodes on the Internet, the briefest of links connected our tiny dots. But that fleeting connection stayed with me longer than most. For those few short weeks, he felt like the only person who truly understood me.

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Alone in my room, “America’s #1 choice for satellite Internet” showed me that I, too, had the permission to fall in love. That’s why when I pass a rusty satellite dish in some stranger’s backyard, I see the beauty of queer worlds opening up.

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